Social panorama

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The model of the social panorama deals with the social ideas ( cognitions ) of humans and their significance for human experience and social behavior .

It was formulated by the Dutch social psychologist and NLP researcher Lucas Derks . In the early 1990s, he identified a number of central influencing factors that, in his opinion, control human social experience and behavior.

Derks described the “social panorama” as an independent psychological system that serves as a subjective filter of perception. The way in which people represent themselves, others and their relationship to them as a mental model , according to Derks, influences the mutual expectations , the unconscious focus of attention , those aspects in the behavior of the other that are emphasized in the perception (the Figure-basic perception described by Gestalt psychology ), the emotions experienced towards others or a group , the resulting selective access to memory and thus large parts of interpersonal perception and behavior.

Derks takes the view that the world of the human imagination is spatially organized.

Social Panorama and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)

The subject of the “social panorama” is all phenomena that are based on “social cognitions” - it is the social psychology of NLP . Derks' view of interpersonal issues differs in some points fundamentally from the classic, Anglo-Saxon dominated NLP:

In the “social panorama”, humans are primarily conceived as social beings. The orientation towards the individual inherent in classic NLP is exceeded here in favor of being embedded in social systems. The fundamental value orientation of the “Social Panorama” emphasizes less the “personal success” than the balance and harmonization of interpersonal relationships.

The central building block is the discovery that people use decontextualized mental representations of others - so-called “personifications” - to represent their relationships with them. According to Derks, "personifications" influence social experience and work as unconscious filters of perception, under whose influence people experience one another.

Logically, change work in the “social panorama” takes place primarily on the level of mental representations of relationships with others and oneself. According to Derks, changes in “personification codes” lead directly to a change in the subjective experience of relationships and - as a result - to an unconsciously realized change in the relationship experience and behavior itself.

Subject areas of the social panorama

Central questions that Derks deals with in his writings are self-experience and identity , authority , dominance and power , the analysis and change of social attitudes such as ethnocentrism , racism , prejudice and the widespread in-group / out-group thinking, theory and Practice of changing the psychodynamics shaped in early childhood (family panorama work) in psychotherapy , training and team building , the phenomenology of spiritual experiences and the exercise of spiritually legitimized rule as well as the “metaphors of power”.

Derks' basic work 'The Social Panorama Model' (1997) was translated into German under the title “The Game of Social Relationships - NLP and the Structure of Interpersonal Experience” (Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2000) and published with a preface by Wolfgang Walker. A heavily revised and updated new version appeared in 2005 under the title "Social Panoramas - Changing The Unconscious Landscape With NLP And Psychotherapy" by Crown House Publishing Ltd. (UK). The book has so far been translated into several languages.

Social panorama and developmental psychology

The ability to imagine other people is learned. Findings in developmental psychology indicate that newborns and infants are not yet able to do this. The ability to separate material and social objects from the stream of consciousness (the "stream of consciousness" according to William James ) and to represent them mentally in a stable manner does not develop until the first year of life. This happens within the framework of the training of object permanence (according to Jean Piaget ).

The development of central parameters such as psychodynamics , affect regulation , basic trust , self-esteem , self-image , the positioning of one's own person in social systems etc. is, according to today's view, largely shaped by the quality of the subjectively experienced interaction experiences of a person in the first years of life. These therefore also have a lasting influence on the emotional experience in adulthood.

This was already recognized by Sigmund Freud . He interpreted social influences in the context of his ' drive theory ' and his structural model of the psyche . He spoke of the development of a super-ego that suppresses and controls drive impulses. In the context of Melanie Klein's object relationship theory , social factors influencing psychological development were discussed in a more differentiated manner. Recently, researchers like Peter Fonagy and his colleagues worked out exactly how this influence comes about as part of their concept of mentalization .

Derks speaks here of so-called 'early formations of personification'. He describes pragmatically oriented ways to uncover these and to change them within the framework of the so-called 'family panorama' work - a therapeutic method for changing the early childhood psychodynamics of a person. He also discusses the references to Bert Hellinger's family constellation and the systemic structure constellations Matthias Varga von Kibéds and Insa Sparrers .

According to Derks' view, the effects of these methods are mainly based on the fact that they make use of the coding mechanisms of the 'social panorama' he describes.

The concept of personification

Derks defines the central building block of his model - the so-called 'personifications' - as "mental representations of others" or oneself (self-representation). He describes them as "holograms" arranged in mental space. These influence the social experience and - in the case of real encounters - push each other as a perception filter between the people involved. Derks describes the entirety of these personification formations as a "social panorama",

Derks' model distinguishes between 'flesh and blood people' and 'personifications'. He describes these mental representations of people as subjectively colored ideas that a person has formed of others. According to Derks, people use 'personifications' to represent their relationships with others and themselves.

According to Derks, 'personifications' are not memory images. These represent events that happened at a certain point in time in a certain place and constitute the autobiographical memory .

In contrast, Derks' concept of "personification" refers to the existence of generalized images that are decontextualized, not related to specific spatio-temporal contexts, abstracted and generalized from experience.

Personalization factors

According to Derks, a complete and functional "personification" is constituted when the following characteristics - the so-called "personification factors" - are taken into account:

  • Location: Every material or social object occupies its own (mental) space. This is usually not the same as your own location. Only in the case of so-called introjections are personifications other than those in one's own body experienced.
  • Name: Each person has (potentially) a name that uniquely identifies them.
  • Visibility: Every person is visible.
  • Aliveness: People are alive.
  • Self-awareness: Every person has an awareness of himself.
  • Emotions: Every person feels feelings.
  • Motives: Every person has certain motives on which they orient their actions.
  • Resources: Every person has certain skills.
  • Perspective: Every person has their own perspective from which they experience and act.

Types of personifications

Within the “social panorama”, the following types of “personifications” can be distinguished:

  • the 'self-personification' represents one's own person (self-image).
  • 'Personifications of others' represent concrete other individuals.
  • 'Group personifications' represent - mostly without specific individuals - social groups as a whole.
  • 'Spiritual personifications' represent everything that exists for a person in the non-material, spiritual realm (God, gods, spirits, demons, deceased, ...).
  • 'Metaphorical personifications' represent oneself or others in a metaphorical form (e.g. when policemen are called 'cops', political opponents as 'blowflies and rats' ( Franz Josef Strauss ) etc.)

Communication channels of the social panorama

According to Derks, indications of the existence and nature of a person's “social panorama” arise from at least four different sources of information. These can be distinguished from one another as follows:

  • The direct naming of relationships (e.g. "She is my wife." "We are business partners.")
  • Talking about localizations. (Example: "I stand by your side." "I left him behind." ...)
  • Non-verbal references to localizations (e.g. gestures and looks in a certain direction when talking about another person or when the person concerned is thinking about them.)
  • The use of relationship metaphors (eg: "They circle around each other like satellites." "We form a common front against the others.")

Derks refers to the abundance of natural language images with spatial implications with which people describe their relationships with one another. He evaluates this as a strong indication that a "social panorama" actually exists at the level of sensory information processing ( imagination ).

Submodalities of the social panorama

As characteristics of 'personifications' in the “social panorama” that influence the experience of relationships , Derks names the following formal properties ( submodalities ) that the respective image - relative to the imaginative - exhibits:

  • The direction in which a 'personification' is represented in mental space. It codes the amount of attention that this 'person (ification)' receives from the imaginator. (Example: "I leave him on the left.", "He moved into the center of public interest.", "The company was targeted by the supervisory authority." ...)
  • The distance in which the image is represented. This codes the degree of intimacy. (Example: "We have come closer to each other." "We have moved away from each other." "We are distantly related to each other.")
  • The spatial orientation of the 'personification' (direction of view). It codes the amount of attention that this 'person (ification)' gives to the imaginator. (Example: "She turned away from me." "He gave me the cold shoulder.")
  • The size of a 'personification', which encodes the extent of the experienced power or dominance of a 'personification'. (Example: "Napoleon was a great general." "The one up there, we down here." "I looked up at him." "He looked very condescending to me." ...)
  • The presence (or absence) of a felt connection and its nature (one-sided or two-sided). It codes the extent and direction of the emotional connection. (Example: "I feel very connected to him." "He cut the bond between us." "Our contact is broken." "I found this relationship to be very one-sided.")

Submodalities that shape not so much the relationship as the general image of a person are:

  • The brightness of the representations (example: "He is a figure of light.", "They are very dark fellows.", ...)
  • The colors of the representations (eg: "She is a dazzling personality.", "He is a colorful bird.", "She was more like a gray mouse." ...)

Like other authors in the field of NLP, Derks assumes that a person's linguistic utterances allow direct conclusions to be drawn about the structural properties of the mental representational structures on which they are based.

Book publications on the social panorama

  • L. Derks: The Social Panorama Model: Social Psychology meets NLP. 1998.
    • German: The game of social relationships - NLP and the structure of interpersonal experience. 4th edition. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2018, ISBN 978-3-608-96408-0 .
  • L. Derks: Spoken in de kop; de sociaal panorama gids. 1999.
  • L. Derks: Social thinkers - NLP en het veranderen van onbewust sociaal gedrag. Servire, Utrecht 2002.
  • L. Derks: Techniki NLP w tworzeniu dobrych związków z ludźmi. 2002.
  • L. Derks: Social Panoramas - Changing the Unconscious Landscape with NLP and Psychotherapy. Crown House Publishing 2005.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See on this Peter Fonagy, György Gergely, Elliot T. Jurist, Mary Target: Affect regulation, mentalization and the development of the self. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-608-94384-6 . (orig .: Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self. Other Press, New York 2002)